The "Wall Street" Sequel That Might Have Been

So everyone knows that Oliver Stone isn't involved with the forthcoming Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps, and we noticed that his longtime co-writer Stanley Weiser, who helped pen the original film as well as Stone's W., isn't on board either. Stone apparently passed on the opportunity to direct, but what's the story with Weiser?

“Everything has changed and they’re starting with a page one rewrite that deals with the current situation in the markets. So it won’t be ready for a year and by that time the economy will have changed again so I wouldn’t be too hopeful.”

Does this mean the current economic crisis will be over in a year? Oh, happy day!

Nevertheless, what was Weiser's version of Wall Street 2?

“[The film takes place] in the present. Basically, he had gone to Europe, like this world trader Marc Rich. He had been making deals in Europe and then he decided he wanted to go back to New York and get back in the action. So he does his jail time.”

“Gekko gets out of jail. It actually opened with Gekko getting out of jail and he’s standing by a curb and a limo pulls up and he’s next to a black kid, who’s a prisoner, and the black kid gets in the limo. The black kid is a rapper and the limo is for the rapper. So he is left standing there on the street alone and no one knows who he is anymore.”

“”…The latter part was set in China and dealing with Chinese money and policing the Chinese.”

Speaking of the sequel, there's an interesting essay on The Daily Beast, "How Reality Trumped My Sequel," from the sequel's second writer Stephen Schiff. Thanks to a little thing called the economic meltdown, his version, turned in this summer, is completely outdated. In the piece, Schiff talks about developing the then modern day Gekko in part by querying hedge funders about what they thought him to be. Even though the suggestions of the Wall Street mogul's imagined behavior—He’d be buying Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull! He’d sleep on a yacht, the way Gianni Agnelli used to! He’d be an activist hedge funder, purchasing companies and managing them aggressively for a few years to make them more profitable, then selling them!—are only months old, they seem as antiquated now as those of Gekko 1.0.